Microsoft's Windows 7 Meltdown fixes from January, February made PCs MORE INSECURE Microsoft's January and February security fixes for Intel's Meltdown processor vulnerability opened up an even worse security hole on Windows 7 PCs and Server 2008 R2 boxes. This is according to researcher Ulf Frisk, who previously found glaring shortcomings in Apple's FileVault disk encryption system. We're told Redmond's …
Time to blame Intel again?
Yes, yes, I am aware that the need to patch is all because of the famed Chipzilla design flaws, but MS have a way of blaming others for their own design flaws, as in the Surface product introductory conditions.
But when you fail in your own field, software updates, for example, can you really call someone else out?
If your car has a GPS which has fault and the car manufacturer has to rewire your car I think it is safe to safe to mention that the problems are due to the faulty GPS the manufacturer.
This doesn't completely excuse the car maker from having dodgy wiring but it is understandable.
Personally I wouldn't like to be in Microsofts shoes at the moment having Meltdown looming over my head.
Intel have a lot to answer for...
You could interpret it that way. And I wouldn't disagree...
We couldalso go with the old 64K limit on early MS-DOS/CPM and say that the boys that owned MS at that time were interested in "expanding" their reach.
Also that somewhat contested statement that 640K (1MB minus MS overhead) was enough for everyone. Until MS wanted to get into the corporate suites and run some real software.
Not to talk about taking an essentially single-user OS and jerry-rigging it to try to server multiple users, and sometimes multiple desktops.
Just like the proverbial frog and the slow leakage of democracy - how have we let these inadequate buggers dictate what 90%+ of the world uses on their desktops? Yes, I know that most embedded devices and ALL phones don't run MS software.
IBM is presumably to blame for the 640k limit; the remainder of the first 1MB (8088's limit) is where stuff like ROM and VRAM were mapped. Now, not designing their software to be able to work around this limitation without various complications (UMA/HMA, EMS, XMS, and the software memory managers to provide interactions with them),... that's on MS and others.
...that I've not received anything other than updates to MS Security Essentials the last few times there's been anything in my update client at all?
I *just* ran it again to be sure & once again it says there's no updates available.
Either I'm so secure that MS can't find anything to patch/fix (unlikely but possible) or MS is off in a corner wanking with both hands, both feet, & a prehensile tail (infinitely more likely).
=-j
Their updates could break windows machines that ran certain kind of anti virus programs. So they made a key in the registry that had to be set before windows update would allow those updates to be applied. If the anti virus vendor had cleared their own software they should send out an update that should set that key. Of course if you do not run any AV you are screwed.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/09/meltdown_patch_anti_malware_conflict/
I don't know if your problem is that, but should be able to check if the key is set manually.
You may want to check that you have the registry key set that they advised in January. Without it your system will show compliant, but won't install any updates after December. I believe it's hklm/software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/QualityCompat
Happy Patching!
"(Posting as AC for a fairly obvious reason.)"
It's very unfortunate what time and age we are transforming backwards. It's like 2015 was a tipping point, before that writing things online was no problem. We have to fear the corrupt corporate stasi, their puppets and bots and naive fanboys these days. So much for free speech. The good thing a few websites like TheReg still offer a comment section and allow anon comments! Most other media removed comment sections, heavily censor comments or put in FB(I) comment section.
The March cumulative updates have been pulled by Microsoft for Windows 7 and 2008R2 due to the networking bug, although still available if you are using WSUS / SCCM and fancy a gamble. You can still get hold of them direct from the Windows Update Catalog but read the KB articles first as they now say you have to run a script first to ensure you don't lose networking.
I have no idea how a normal user is supposed to update thier Window 7 machine.
For those allergic to PowerShell (you can also 'net stop' instead of 'sc stop', but why?):
sc stop wuauserv
sc config wuauserv start= disabled
sc stop bits
sc config bits start= disabled
(note the space after the =, it matters)
Wrapping it all in a pair of batch scripts (or something fancier to toggle it) is a possibility.
Why is Microsoft allowed to sell a defective OS and distribute defective so called "security" updates that compromise actual PC security and operation with no liability for the damage these defective products inflict? The user's agreement should in no way allow for such irresponsible behavior and financial damage to consumers and enterprise.
Your bank details, your photos being held to ransom, the system being zombied to attack others in a DDOS.....
For a single user home PC meltdown is only effectively as dangerous as a keylogger; by the time you have let somebody root your computer to the extent that you can run a meltdown exploit then it's endgame anyway; everything but the bank details would be done with other bits of malware than a meltdown exploit.
Meltdown is most serious for servers and especially cloud services as you have multiple users sharing the CPU, and compromising one user allows you to basically read any users data from the CPU. For a home user, it's not too much more serious than a keylogger as far as I can see.
Well, if it'd been entered then it might be resident in memory and retreivable through meltdown. Meltdown on it's own certainly wouldn't hold photos to ransom or be part of a zombie network DDOS'ing people.
Hence my point that in a single user enviroment meltdown is only as dangerous as a keylogger for most practical purposes. It becomes more scary at server or cloud level where it can pull out details of other users, but that's not relevant in a single user enviroment.
Huh, I have mixed emotions. I'll count myself as lucky(?) as the January and February patches failed to install. The unlucky part is that the March hack job succeeded. The truly pitiful part is that I actually download and install this crap by hand via the command line on my personal machines. Maybe it's time to stay a month behind to see what shit stirs up, maybe six months.
Dear MS,
Epic -->
"Unless, of course, yours is one of the systems that also happens to be suffering from a different bug in the patch that is causing networking problems on some servers that run VMware hypervisors (and possibly some Broadcom NICs- we're trying to confirm that,) in which case you now get to choose between security and network access."
Quite the choice: do or don't. Seems that the choice to be damned or not is out of your hands.
It seems Microsoft aren't satisfied merely shooting at their own feet so they decided to take it to the next level.
Of course, MS being a joke is nothing new but this is one enormous screw up, even by their super low standards.
It is also not unheard of for Microsoft to deliberately introduce new show-stopping bugs into operating systems they'd rather people upgraded from. It was the exact same tactic they used when Vista was replacing XP e.g. SP3 broke popular on-board networking and sound on a lot of motherboards unless the drivers were installed prior to the service pack, otherwise the PC fell silent and had no networking no doubt convincing the technically illiterate that the actual hardware was broken and it was time for a new PC (and the latest version of Windows).
What are the odds that the official fix advice will be "upgrade to Windows 10"?
Except the March security patch broke wireless networking on my older Windows 10 laptop with an Atheros card. No event logs, no service problems; it just would';t see any Wi-Fi points at all until I uninstalled it.
It's probably because of that "Designed for Windows Vista" RFID sticker on it, eh?
Break the fundamental security in Windows 7 and hope that people go to Windows 10 as its more secure.
Break the existing working networking functionality so it has the same 'performance' as Windows 10 networking.
I feel more secure just not doing updates to my Windows 7 machines.
I've already mentioned here that I stopped upgrading Windows 7 in January feeling the Spectre and Meltdown medicine is worse than the malady. I feel 100% vindicated now. The March patches patch January vulnerabilities while the network may stop working. What kind of joke it is unless it is a last ditch effort by Microsoft to make me use Windows 10?
Seems to be fine so far but noticed that some stuff that previously worked now won't.
Such as Bluetooth.
Also has anyone managed to upgrade a shipped-with-32-bit system to 64 if everything else supports it?
The system has a 4GB hardwired RAM limit but thats not too bad for some applications.
Funnily enough, it's situations like this why I demand proper control over updates. As I have an AMD system (hence, no Meltdown), I chose not to apply the January patches. Thought I'd let the worst of the issue blow over, and give chance for any bugs in the (rushed) patches to be sorted out and fixed first of all. As a couple of months have passed, I was now beginning to think about patching, and then this story rises up.
I will apply the patches to my system in due course, but MS's "quality control" doesn't have the greatest reputation lately, hence why I prefer to delay installation a bit first.
More like Windows NT4 (Nuclear Submarine Edition) patches finally show up late, on CD-R and get installed causing every single missile to launch at the same time say 01/04/18 at 04.00 because some crazy phool figured that this would be a good time to automagically install the rollup patch and made some really boneheaded mistake like a fandango-on-core.
By the time someone figured out that it wasn't an April Fools joke 2900 megadeaths and a radioactive death cloud result, the only good news being that Redmond *and* Cupertino both get taken out by a pair of 9 megaton yield SLBMs in the first ten minutes. Karma's a b*tch!
The Carbon Footprint of People Bricking Themselves...it must a massive cost, all that extra f*rted pollutant, not to mention the extra wasteful CPU cycles, extra reboots.
I've got a list of all the pre-spectre patches and this is all I will be using 'till (microsoft kills Win7) this resolves.
"The line between cynicism and skepticism is very, very thin."
The line is very very thin because you are using the 'wrong' unit of information to map your data.
If it is represented by a qubit thence 'there is no spoonline'*. !!! :)
*[Never thought I would ever use 'thence' in a sentence :) :) ]
Ever since 2016 it is insecure to update Windows 7. Just disable Windows updates and use Chrome and other software. Why? Ever since 2016 Windows updates come with backported spyware, forced upgrade dialogs, slower replacement components to annoy user. Exactly the same happend with Windows XP. It was best to stay with Service Pack 2 and never install SP3 and disable Windows Updates and install selected patches via third party websites that really care about the user and Windows ecosystem. Their evil strategy, again and again.
For the short and mid term Windows 7 64-bit is perfect. No other OS (beside macOS, iOS, Android) is as polished, stable and great to use. For long term a switch to Google Android, Google Magenta or Linux or FreeBSD is inevitable. Win8 and Win10 are a showstopper, loosing control of PC/notebook is a no go. Unfortunately MSFT has their fingers inofficially in Gnome and KDE to sabotage them, so both suck nowadays, KDE 3.5, Unity and Gnome 2 (now Mate) were great. Almost everything is web based anyway, and for the few native applications the hope is the new Google OS "Magenta" destroys Windows one for good.
Has anyone ever installed x64 Ubuntu (probably going for 18.04 Bionic Beaver) on a netbook?
Its a 4GB dual core Atom with a recent graphics chip and I've also replaced the terrible wifi card with something a bit less primitive (Scotty voice) and ripped out the blue LEDs.
It does have Bluetooth on the card but a second unit isn't out of the question and adding diskless cold boot via 128Mbit BIOS chip and SD via webcam interface would be handy.
Interesting note: the majority of problems with cheaper netbooks are simple overheating, I have determined that simple overvoltage to the fan (normally +5V) or second HDD fan will give a bit more cooling.
Also replacing the switching regulators with more modern equivalents and adding active filters reduces RF noise a lot, should really document this mod on Hackaday.
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